Up to this point, we have scrutinised models and theories of SLA with respect to how they explain the constructs of input and intake and discussed first exposure studies and their objectives. We are now confronted with reality: our French NSs are expected to perceive, comprehend, analyse, process and acquire Polish, a language they know nothing about. What will they do and how will they do it? As we have seen in the preceding chapters, the extent to which learners use L1 knowledge when processing a TL is controversial. One way of testing its initial influence is to adopt a resolutely contrastive analysis attitude and to pinpoint differences between the two systems (NL and TL) that are testable. To this end, this chapter provides this type of analysis of Polish and French that will not only serve as a reference for readers who are unfamiliar with Polish and/or French, but will also illuminate differences between specific phenomena of the two systems that were tested in the current study.

An Introduction to Polish and French

Our reason for choosing Polish as the TL of this study is two-fold: (1) little research has been devoted to the study of adult acquisition of Polish; and (2) Polish is interestingly different from French in a variety of ways. Polish, for instance, is a highly inflected language with flexible pragmatic word order in which NP ellipsis is common. Person, number and gender are marked on the verb in Polish, so the syntactic subject of any given verb does not necessarily need to be made explicit. French, on the other hand, has relatively fixed SVO word order, has weak morphology and generally requires an explicit subject. Polish has no articles, but expresses determination by means of pronominal adjectives which agree in gender, number and case with the nouns they modify.